First, an apology for slacking on the blog posts.  While I was in Mbotyi for the Sardine Run I was completely out of internet contact.  I got back to NYC and had two days to dry out, repack my gear, do laundry, and fill out expense reports before hopping on a plane to the Dominican Republic.

If you read my posts from May, you’ll remember my incredible luck while on my final Indiana University Underwater Science research project.  There I was, helping out with another excavation for a National Geographic film shoot when I was asked to do all of the underwater filming for the program, a Nat Geo Special no less!  It was a dream come true, and better yet they asked me to return in July to finish filming the excavations on the opposite side of the island.  So, South Africa came and went in a flurry of excitement and before I knew it I was working for National Geographic.

I had been to the settlement of La Isabela, on the north side of the D.R., four years earlier on my first IU field school.  Now I was returning not just as a student observer, but as one of the film crew.  If you think that working as a field researcher is tough, try being the guy who has to film them!  I was very impressed with the whole crew, who essentialy worked 12 hour days every day to film before the IU research group arrived, during the excavations, and of course catching those beautiful scenic shots in the gentle light of the evening.

The underwater filming was a bit different.  The Indiana University crew, my good friends, mentors and essentially my second family, have been working at the settlement of La Isabela for years now, and for a good reason.  La Isabela is the first European settlement in the New World – where Christopher Columbus first established a permanent presence in the Americas.  What is even more interesting, though, is what lies in the bay that La Isabela overlooks.  On one of Columbus’ several journeys to the Americas, he and his Spanish comrades were unfortunate enough to experience their first hurricane.  Their ships, anchored helplessly in the harbor, were torn to shreds and sank on the spot.  It’s these ships that Charlie Beeker, my former professor and mentor, has been looking for for a good part of his career.

Finding these ships is not as easy as poking around in the bay until you hit cannons, though.  While we know where they are (after a number of magnetometer surveys) the substrate covering these five-hundred-year-old ships is treacherous.  A fine, silty, clay-like substance called sapropel lies about ten feet thick on the sea floor.  In Columbus’ time, the bay would likely have resembled most Caribbean shallows, covered in sand and corals.  But due to intense logging in the area and the resulting runoff, hundreds of years of sediment, washed into the bay from the nearby river, have compacted to form a thick layer of what is essentially Jell-O.  To cut through this Jell-O we use a suction dredge, or an underwater vacuum.  While the dredge is incredibly effective at sucking up sand, it takes a bit more effort to clear the sapropel.

Another team of underwater archaeologists who were attempting to excavate the site had an unfortunate experience with this tricky substrate.  Figuring that the sapropel had enough structure to support itself, they dug a hole four feet across and twelve feet deep, only to have it cave in on them during their excavation.  They were sure that was the end.  But somehow they made it out of their silty grave, and we learned from their mistakes.  Our excavation pits had a 2-1 ratio: to make a hole six feet deep, it must be twelve feet in diameter.  Naturally, this made progress incredibly slow.  What’s even more, the movement of the dredging and the working divers stirs up the loose surface layer of the sapropel, creating zero visibility.  I thought I had been in zero vis before, but I was wrong.  It was the first time I tried to check my air that I realized what I had gotten myself into.  With the gauge pushed up against the face plate of my communications mask, I still literally could not make out the numbers.  Next, I tried my hand.  I could feel my fingers touching the mask, but I just couldn’t see them.  Finally, with my hand pushed right up against the face plate, I could see the vague shadow of five fingers and a palm.  The only comfort we had down there was being able to talk to each other, so that when we were kneeling six inches apart we could say ‘Hey Niki, where are you?’ and get a reassuring ‘Right here!’ in return.

So how does one film in this environment?  Just like the land cameraman – show up early.  I was lucky to get three feet of visibility before the divers showed up and about one foot for the first ten to fifteen minutes of dredging.  After that it was all done by touch.  I’d grab whoever was working the dredge head’s arm, feel my way down to their hand and to the dredge head itself, maneuver the camera until I was touching it with both hands, aim it to where I thought the dredge head and the hole would be, and hope that I had set it to ‘Record.’  There must have been lots of frustrated divers with camera lenses inches from their face, but luckily I was friends with them all before I became an annoying cameraman so I sustained minimal verbal abuse.

And despite all this hardship, did we find Columbus’ shipwrecks?  I guess you’ll just have to wait until the Nat Geo program ‘Lost Fleet’ airs in November!  You can rest assured I’ll provide details on the air date when I find them out.